When I became a teacher, I was young and idealistic and determined never to become like some old teachers I know, determined to keep in touch with the ones I teach, determined never to succumb to the old "Young people nowadays are just so [insert derogative adjective here].
Now, I know what it feel like to hold up a mirror to society - and society's just not interested.
I'm currently reading "Fahrenheit 451" with my Year 13. That's the ones who are about to finish their education at Grammar School and call themselves Germany's elite.
Fahrenheit 451, as you probably know, is about a society in which books are burned and people have no desire for any profound information, but prefer light entertainment via television walls, provided by a totalitarian government that wishes to keep people shallow and politically immature. The book was written fifty years ago. That dystopian vision has long become reality. Just that there's no need to burn our books. We simply leave them to rot on our shelves.
I started to develop characterizations for the novel's main characters, and quickly found out that only a handful of students were participating. When I started asking slightly more inquisitively, it turned out that out of twenty students, only two had read the novel, one of them in German instead of English. The others had just entered "Fahrenheit 541 summary" into Google.
It turned out they weren't even abashed. For them, it was the most logical thing in the world to be set a reading assignment, and then to go online and read a two-paragraph summary on the internet. AND FEEL THAT THEY HAD DONE THEIR DUE.
Just last week, I was teaching my Year 8 how to write a summary, and for practice, I told them to write summaries to two books of their choice.
The next day, two students put up their hands, and with a straight face and every conviction that this was a valid excuse, told me that they had found themselves unable to complete the task, as they had never read a book in their lives.
We are talking about Grammar School students here.
My five-year old son knows off more books by heart than those kids have read in their thirteen years.
Welcome to the world without books. Welcome to the world that believes BBC documentaries are History, that entire novels can be compressed without loss to a 300 word summary on edu-server.com, and that the time saved by not reading can go into the really important things - TV.
It didn't even take a totalitarian government to get us to this place. We did it all by ourselves.
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`anmari has been spreading her infectious positivity throughout our community for over 6 years. Throughout this time Ana has been at the core of all things devious, passionately developing an eclectic gallery, helping organise devmeets, participating in chat events and also recently completed dedicating her time as a Community Volunteer. We are absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for May 2013 to `anmari, congratulations! Read More
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Agony 
My Creative Writing student boyfriend (who is graduating 3 weeks and going for his masters in Creative Writing) just about killed himself laughing and said "it's true". then pondered if perhaps he might be looking to be in the wrong profession.
I'm so copying this over to facebook. it's worth a read, and in fact, facebook is the only reading some people get these days.
Your post surprised even me, and I'm 16, around the age of your students. In your situation I wouldn't be sure if I can do anything either, but here's what I would try. Give them a list of relatively short books that you've read (it's maybe easiest with classics - Jane Austen, Shakespeare (Hamlet's not really a long read and it's worth it, I think), maybe P.G. Wodehouse, or famous novels like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Night, and so on... try to pick ones you think they'll enjoy) and tell them to pick one and read it till the end of the month or in two months time (I think if you give them about 30-40 pages a day that would be okay) and then at the end of that time you'll give them an assignment, maybe essay or presentation, in which they should be able to show you they've read the book, share their impressions with their classmates, analyze plot, characters, themes... This can be done using reviews from internet too, but there must be a way for you to tell when they have read the book. It means a lot of extra work for you, though, and I don't know if you have the time for that with two small children.
The other option is to assign them pages and give quizzes with really specific questions in the beginning of class every time but I never liked that approach.
If this is going to give you some hope about the whole thing, I don't know a person who has not read even one book. In fact I know many many people who love to read. Maybe its just a temporary thing, what you're facing... maybe younger students read more than this grade you're teaching have read.
I think, really, as a teacher all you can do is try, and the rest is up to them; but if you teach your own children to like books, that's the best, really the best thing you can do.